


Somewhere I Have Never Traveled

by lustmordred



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-29
Updated: 2011-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-24 04:05:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She offers him her free hand, still clutching the urn to her body with the other, and he looks down at her fingers splayed out and waiting. He has a flash of memory, a memory of all the times before this one that she took his hand or he took hers and they would go. They were always going somewhere, running together from the moment he met her. The first time he ever spoke to her was to tell her to run for her life. He thinks that with all his years of constantly running, he would like to sit still with Rose Tyler beside him for a little while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere I Have Never Traveled

Over stone walls and barns,  
miles from the black-eyed Susans,  
over circus tents and moon rockets  
you are going, going.  
You who have inhabited me  
in the deepest and most broken place,  
are going, going.  
An old woman calls up to you  
from her deathbed deep in sores,  
asking, 'What do you keep of her?'  
She is the crone in the fables.  
She is the fool at the supper  
and you, sir, are the traveler.

_Anne Sexton_  


 

Rose picks up her husband’s ashes from the mortuary on a Sunday afternoon. It’s cold and raining like the sky is falling. She pulls the collar of her coat close to her neck and bows her head beneath her umbrella, made useless by the wind that keeps trying to whip it from her hand, and dashes from her car to the door. The receptionist stares at her while she waits for a mortician and Rose tries to ignore how uncomfortable it makes her. She thinks that she should feel numb inside, dead inside, empty like all the saddest love poems say it is in the end, but she’s not.

“Hello,” she finally says to the receptionist. She introduced herself when she came in so the greeting serves only to point out the woman’s own rudeness to her.

“Sorry, Miss,” the receptionist mumbles, finally looking away from her.

Rose frowns at her. In this world, she is famous and she is never allowed for a moment to forget it. In this world, she’s the mysterious, secret child of Pete and Jackie Tyler. Jackie Tyler who should be dead and Pete Tyler who is miraculously alive, father and mother to a girl who was never born but was. In this world, Rose Tyler is really a mini Yorkshire terrier.

“Mrs. Tyler-Smith.” The mortician who walks toward her with his practiced air of sympathy flawlessly at the ready looks far too alive to her. She imagines morticians looking more… well, dead. He has a pleasant and boyish face, freckles, green eyes with just a dash of blue, and a tan under his very serious grey suit. He is so alive.

She smiles at him and offers him her hand. “I’m just Rose Tyler today,” she says. This surprises him she can tell, but she doesn’t say it because she doesn’t care. She says it because “Smith” was always a pseudonym anyway and now that the man who gave it to her is gone, she wears it uncomfortably like a scratchy wool jumper.

“Of course,” the man says. He shakes her offered hand briefly and his palm is cool and dry in hers. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he says.

In her mind, she hears, _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry_ , and it hurts so she smiles wider and says, “Thank you.”

~~*~~

River is the only one of them sleeping in his bed. The Doctor can’t sleep, so he wanders the TARDIS until his wandering takes him to the library, where he wanders some more. He makes a show of pacing before the stacks, though he’s alone so he doesn’t know who exactly the show is for. This new incarnation gets strange ideas sometimes and has some very odd habits.

He leaves the library after only an hour of aimlessly browsing. There is no swimming pool anymore, it’s moved itself somewhere and he has yet to locate it, and the only book he really wants to read is tucked safely under River’s pillow. It is safer there than it would be if it were guarded by a pit full of vipers.

Everything is so quiet at night in the TARDIS parked by the side of the road. It’s a long stretch of road somewhere along the coast of Norway, a strange place for an old blue police box, to be sure. There aren’t any places nearby for curiosity seekers to pull over and investigate it, though, so strange or not, cars just drive on.

The Doctor parked it there himself. He thinks he did a fine job of it, too. River still thinks she does it better because she doesn’t leave the brake on and she knows how to use the blue stabilizers. He’s still not convinced the blue things _are_ stabilizers and he leaves the brake on intentionally. He would miss that sound if it were gone.

“Why Norway?” he asks the blue console light as he passes through on his way back to his bed. “Why _here_?”

Of course the TARDIS doesn’t answer.

He gets back into bed and lays there staring up at the ceiling, still unable to sleep. His mind won’t let him. He’s thinking about _Dårlig Ulv Stranden_ and Amy Pond standing there with him on a beach a million, billion miles and years away from it asking him, _What are you thinking?_ and when he answered her and said, _Time can be rewritten_ , he was remembering Rose Tyler. All the times they saved the world. All the times they just stood still in awe before some new and wondrous thing.

In her sleep, River rolls over and lays against him. He can feel her warm sleeping breath on his chest and the way her blonde curls tickle his skin. He closes his eyes with a soft sigh.

“I forgive you,” he murmurs. He touches a hand to her head, feels her hair curl and wrap around his fingers almost like a sentient thing. “I forgive you for what you will do.”

~~*~~

There are a lot of things that don’t exist in this world that Rose remembers from her old life. The stars are different, but how often does anyone look at the stars? Mostly what has changed are the people she knows and the relationships she had. The first time she ran up to an old friend to greet them only to be met with confusion and a frown she felt it like she’d been punched in the stomach. The fact that she is an impossible anomaly in this time and place was driven home like a tent spike through her belly and oh, how she had wept.

One thing that still exists in this world just as it had in the other is sickness and disease. Violence still happens and so do accidents. People die. Her husband, her _Doctor_ , had died.

She walks along the tide line carrying an urn in her arms containing the ashes of his mortal body and the cruel irony of it does not escape her. She has outlived him. By anyone’s standards, except perhaps his own, he died young and he left her all alone.

The tide is out and Rose sits on a rock close to the water with the urn cradled in her arms. The wind whips at her hair, making it fly back from her face like a flag. Like a banner. This thought reminds her of the bible for some reason, a line from the pornographic Song of Songs about a woman who is as terrible as an army with banners. The thought makes her smile even as her eyes fill with tears because it’s something the Doctor would have loved. Something that might have made him laugh, touch her face and say her name, tell her with a cheeky grin how very terrifying to him she is.

She places the urn on the sand between her feet so that she can duck her head, put her face in her hands and cry. Little hiccups of laughter catch in her throat and for a little while she is both laughing and crying at the same time.

Around her neck on a chain she still wears the TARDIS key the Doctor gave her all those years ago when she first knew him and she sees it dangling there above the urn when she opens her eyes. She clasps it in her hand and squeezes, taking deep, gasping breaths until the urge to scream passes. It doesn’t glow or warm in her hand, but she doesn’t really expect it to. Sometimes it does and she thinks maybe it’s the TARDIS still after so long telling her somewhere out there he’s still alive.

Sometimes she wishes it wouldn’t because it’s like it is speaking to her then. _He’s coming_ , it says, but she never knows when or where. She can’t begin to imagine how the TARDIS, with the vortex at its heart, perceives time. So she waits and so the years have passed.

~~*~~

He knows where the TARDIS has landed the moment he opens the door and breathes the air. He takes a second to silently scold himself for ever daring to think that _he_ was flying the TARDIS and not the other way around, then the Doctor steps outside and closes the door carefully behind him.

It’s morning and everyone will be awake soon. Soon River will open her eyes and put out her hand on the bed looking for him and when he isn’t there, she’ll sit up and look around, maybe call for him before she spots the note on his pillow telling her he just stepped out to have a look around. Amy and Rory will wake up and maybe they will wander out into the control room to find him and ask him where they’ve landed. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they will stay in bed late like proper newlyweds.

The Doctor smiles faintly to himself as he thinks of this. This is his new, jumbled little family, odd and so very perfect in many ways.

He follows the road right to where he knows all along that it will lead him, and he stands on the rocks over the beach with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun that is still bright through the clouds. When his eyes focus, he can see her, a small spot in the vague shape of a hauntingly familiar woman sitting on a rock far out on the sand where the water only just reaches out close enough to touch her.

If Rose Tyler were to tell him about the terrible woman from the bible in this moment, he would not laugh. He would understand completely because she has always terrified him a little. She is so completely common and ordinary, so deceptively _extraordinary_ and totally inescapable. She is at one end of his fateful timeline and River is at the other and just when he thinks he knows what that means, the TARDIS brings him to a road near a beach, near a _bay_ he thought to never see again.

~~*~~

Rose has no idea how long she sits there on the rock clutching the cold TARDIS key. She sits hunched over in a nearly fetal position, trying to push it back down, trying to regain the control that has so far carried her through her days, but she goes right on hurting. She makes herself sit up straight when she notices that she has been rocking herself, only slightly, not enough that it would be noticed by anyone looking across the beach at a girl sitting on a rock by the tide line.

Her hands shake when she drags her hair back from her face and she laughs a little at how completely _not_ with it she is right now. She doesn’t really have friends here in this world, it’s a habit she soon fell out of after the last time she stood on this beach, but she has colleagues and they’re _friendly_. Working for Torchwood is hard enough, it would be impossible to do if she didn’t care at all. But she’s hard now like she wasn’t when she was younger. She knows it and she knows they see it in her. Being the one always left behind makes a person hard. Jackie used to say that and Rose still remembers it from her wandering days. She doesn’t feel hard now, though. She doesn’t feel strong or tough. She feels small enough to step on and like she’s coming apart. Like a cracked hourglass with all the sand leaking out on the ground.

She sniffs and wipes at the tears on her face with the back of her hand. Her mascara has run and her tears leave black stripes of it on her hands, which makes her choke on another laughing sob for no real reason she can think of.

A hand lightly touches her back between her shoulders and Rose jerks away from it in surprise and almost falls off the rock. She catches herself and stares at the man standing there, her heart racing. She recognizes him and her heart just races faster and suddenly she is not small and waiting to be stepped on, she is tiny and broken and _fiercely_ angry.

“No,” she says. She means it to be a shout but it comes out of her throat a low croak. She stands in front of him, her heels in the lapping tide and her hands clenching and unclenching in fists. “No!” She yells it at him and the Doctor rocks back from her a little looking stunned. “You,” Rose says, pointing at him.

The Doctor regards her with lifted brows and points at himself. “Me?”

“Yes. You are not here,” Rose says, walking toward him with her finger still out.

“I’m not,” the Doctor readily agrees, shaking his head.

Rose makes a soft sound of amusement in her throat. “You can’t be here,” she says and she is _not_ laughing. This is not the least bit funny. She wonders if she might not be a touch hysterical.

“Okay, Rose,” the Doctor says. He makes his voice soft and calm and she recognizes it as the tone he uses when he’s dealing with someone he suspects is going to behave irrationally.

Rose’s face falls and she throws herself at him, hitting him in a blind fit of grief and anger. Her short, ineffectual blows and slaps land on his chest as he tries to hush her and hold her hands away from his face. “You can’t be here _now_!” she screams at him. “You can’t do this to me _now_!”

~~*~~

Rose doesn’t scream at him for long, though she doesn’t have to, a little is more than enough to make her point quite clearly. She does manage to land one blow to the side of the Doctor’s face that makes his ears ring for about five minutes right before she gives up and slumps against him to cry. Feeling awkward and a little lost about what to do with her, the Doctor pets her hair and tells her about this planet he visited once, Lux Battina, that had fire-breathing chickens. Except they didn’t really breathe the fire so much as spit it. Except it wasn’t actually the fire they spit but a flammable liquid rather like kerosene, which they ignited by working their throats to click two small stones similar to flint together. These same stones were part of the birds’ digestive system just like some birds on Earth and…

“Oh, stop it,” Rose says, and lightly shoves him.

“You’ve stopped crying, though. Look at you,” the Doctor says, tucking a finger under her chin to tilt her head back and look at her face. She has mascara smeared under her watery eyes, but she’s smiling despite herself. “Just look at you,” he says again softly.

“Look at _me_? Look at yourself,” Rose says. She fingers his bowtie with a perplexed frown and shakes her head. “You look ridiculous.”

Offended, the Doctor scowls down at his bowtie where she’s rubbing it between her finger and thumb, then brushes her hand away. “Bowties are cool,” he says, and straightens it.

Rose smiles at him and wipes at her eyes. “Yeah.”

“You got older,” the Doctor says, putting out his hand to touch her even as she steps back from him.

Rose laughs a little. “Of course I did.”

“What’d you do that for?” he says.

“You went and got a new face. What did _you_ do that for?” Rose counters.

The Doctor blinks at her. “Ah, well you see… A thing happened. No choice in the matter. It wasn’t a thing of choice, just a thing.”

“A thing,” Rose says flatly.

“Exactly,” the Doctor says.

“And you didn’t have a choice,” Rose says.

“Nope, none at all.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Yes, well… It was either this or I let a very nice old man who was very near and dear to a wonderful woman named Donna Noble--I believe you’ll remember her--die a horrific death,” the Doctor says. He doesn’t snap at her, but it’s a near thing and she looks at him like she knows it, too. “It’s a bad way to thank someone for saving the universe,” he mutters.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Rose says softly.

To the Doctor’s horror, Rose looks like she might start crying all over again. “Oh no, don’t do _that_. What are you doing that for anyway? You’re leaking everywhere,” he says, touching her shoulders and up into her hair in a tentative, uncertain way. He really doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s completely out of his depth. He also knows that before he changed and got a new face along with all the other funny new things that weren’t there before, he might have had a better idea about it. “Come now, it’s not as bad as all of that, is it? It’s still me in here, just new… paint.”

Rose shakes her head and puts a hand over her face, mostly hiding her eyes from him. “But he’s gone. He’s _really_ gone now,” she says.

“Haven’t I just been saying--? Hold on,” the Doctor says, suddenly looking around them. “What about… _him_? The _other_ other me. The…” He gestures expressively with his hands trying to show her what he means. “… In blue with the hair. He’s supposed to be with you.”

Rose takes a deep, watery breath and drops her hand from her face. “He’s over there,” she says, pointing down at the rock where she was sitting before.

The Doctor goes over to the rock and walks around it, head cocked and one brow raised speculatively. “Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? A rock. Tell me something, is he _inside_ it or did he just turn--”

“No, you daft man, not the _rock_ ,” Rose says. She huffs out a soft half amused, half exasperated breath and goes over to where she set the urn down in the sand beside the rock. She picks it up and shows it to him, but when he just looks at her, patiently waiting for an explanation, she says, “He died. He… These are his ashes.”

“Oh,” the Doctor says. He looks at the urn intently for a minute, then says, “ _Ohhhhh_. Oh, no.”

And it all makes so much more sense once he understands about that. _That_ is a very big deal, yes indeed. There isn’t anything he can do about it, either, except be right where he is and let her cry on his shirt and insult his tie. The tie can handle it anyway and if the other Doctor is dead, he understands her initial, less than joyful reaction to seeing him again now quite a lot better.

“Rose,” he says, not sure really what else he intends to follow that with.

“Sit with me,” Rose says.

She offers him her free hand, still clutching the urn to her body with the other, and he looks down at her fingers splayed out and waiting. He has a flash of memory, a memory of all the times before this one that she took his hand or he took hers and they would go. They were always going somewhere, running together from the moment he met her. The first time he ever spoke to her was to tell her to run for her life. He thinks that with all his years of constantly running, he would like to sit still with Rose Tyler beside him for a little while.

He takes her hand and lets her lead him, thinking that even for him, with the whole of space and time at his disposal, it’s not every day he gets to be there for his own funeral.

~~*~~

The quiet stillness lasts between them for a grand total of nine and a half minutes. After that, Rose takes pity on him and says, “So how did you get here?”

“No idea,” the Doctor says, visibly relieved that he’s been given permission to speak. “I thought all the walls between here and there were sealed completely. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?”

“The TARDIS will do what she wants,” Rose says with a smile. “Always has. Best just get used to it.”

“She’s always making me _late_ is what she does,” the Doctor grumbles. “I said _five minutes_ and she pops me back twelve _years_. Amy still hasn’t forgiven me for that one.”

Rose watches him thoughtfully, amused when he fidgets. “So, who’s _Amy_?”

“Amy is… Well, she’s Amy. Amelia Pond. Scottish girl I crashed into--almost literally--with a scary crack in her bedroom wall,” the Doctor says. “You’d like her. No, on second thought, you wouldn’t. She tried to kiss me. You’d just argue, I know how you are.”

“They’re always trying to kiss you,” Rose says. She rolls her eyes and turns her gaze back to the beach.

“They are, aren’t they? Wonder what that‘s about,” the Doctor says, thinking about it. He clears his throat after a few moments, putting that train of thought away for later, and says, “I was thinking. Of you. The TARDIS must have--”

“Brought you to me,” Rose finishes for him. “She does that.”

The Doctor looks surprised. “ _Does_ she?”

Rose makes an affirmative sound in her throat and doesn’t explain that. There are things that she can’t ever tell him, things that are forbidden that way because of who and what they are. Because they play with time and don’t just follow it like everyone else, there are rules and they must obey them. She often wonders how things might be different if this were not the case.

“Why were you thinking of me?” she asks.

“I was standing on the beach of Alfava Metraxis. River was there. She always makes me think of you. Not that she’s anything like you. She definitely is not… much. Do you know, she calls me _Sweetie_?” he says. “Sweetie.”

“She either knows you very well or not at all,” Rose says, amused. “What does the beach of Alfava Metraxis look like? I don’t think I ever saw that one.”

The Doctor looks around at the beach where they are, then back down at Rose and smiles faintly. “It looks remarkably similar to this,” he says.

“Should I be jealous of this River woman?” Rose says. Her tone is serene so that it comes out sounding more ironic than she really intends it.

“Should you?” the Doctor says. “Why? Amy believes she’s my wife, you know, but you know what I think?”

Rose shakes her head. “What do you think?”

The Doctor leans over to speak softly in her ear. “I think she’s going to kill me, that’s what I think.”

Rose leans back from him to look at him, trying to see if he’s serious. He returns her look with a completely guileless expression and she startles him by laughing.

“Is that funny?” the Doctor says, blinking at her in confusion. “Women running around kissing me and murdering me and you’re laughing about it. That’s good, is it, Rose Tyler?”

“No, no, it’s only after everything… and you think a woman named River who might be your wife is going to be the one to finally do you in,” Rose says. “It’s a bit absurd is all.”

“What’s so absurd about that? I’d never see it coming. It’s brilliant,” the Doctor says.

“Oh, yeah, I suppose it is,” Rose says. “But she can’t really be your wife.”

The Doctor watches her for a few moments with narrowed eyes then, just because he can’t help himself, says, “Why not?”

Rose holds up her hand, her fingers still linked through the Doctor’s, and the diamond on her finger shines at him. “You’re already married.”

He continues to frown for a little while, running it through his head, then suddenly he grins. “You’re right,” he says. He kisses the back of her hand as though blessing the ring on her finger and looks slightly more relaxed. “That changes everything, doesn’t it?”

“Not all that much, really. I suppose she could still murder you,” Rose says. She’s not very concerned, though.

Though she knows it’s not true, she can’t quite shake the conviction that the Doctor just _can’t_ die. Not completely. Her husband hadn’t believed he could die, either, and because he was the Doctor in every way that counted most, neither had Rose. They had lived accordingly and she doesn’t regret a single moment.

“Could do,” the Doctor says. “She could also be my wife. I’ve had several. Sometimes at once.”

“What?” Rose says.

“That’s usually accidental,” the Doctor assures her.

“ _Accidental_?” she says. “How do you get accidentally married to a lot of people?”

“By accident,” the Doctor says.

“Right. Of course,” Rose says. She chuffs a soft laugh. “You’re very…”

“What?”

“Different.”

“Good different or bad different?”

Rose smiles. He’s asked her that before and she remembers it with a strange combination of pleasure and pain. “Oh, just different. And you’re still not ginger.”

“I _know_!” He brushes at his hair with his free hand. “Still just kind of brownish. But at least I’m not a girl. I had a bit of a scare there for a moment at first but the chin set it straight.”

His looks are the least of what is different about him.

They sit for a little while and just watch the birds over the water. There are gulls circling a spot down the beach and Rose wonders what must be down there. It could really be anything. She saw a red jellyfish once near there that had washed up on the sand as the tide was going out. The things sting horribly, but it was so beautiful with colors like the rainbow colors of oil in water and it made her sad to look at it, dried up there like that.

“So are you still out there running around the universe saving the world from aliens?” she asks the Doctor.

“What about you?” he says instead of answering her. “Working for Torchwood. You save the world from aliens all the time.”

“Mostly just Cardiff,” Rose says. “Sometimes the world on a good day. Just this one, though. They still haven’t invented time travel yet and the Doctor wouldn’t tell them how to do it.”

“They’ll get around to it,” the Doctor says. “You called him the Doctor?”

“Who?” Rose says. “Oh. Yes, of course I do… Did. I did.”

“Didn’t he ever tell you his… our… Hmm, well that’s odd, isn’t it? _Our_ name?” the Doctor asks.

Rose smiles and looks embarrassed. “I couldn’t pronounce it.”

She had tried, though. On their wedding night they had lain there in bed on top of the sheets facing each other and he had repeated it to her and had her recite it back to him. She had failed utterly. Though it had sounded fine to her own ears, the Doctor laughed every time she tried to say it until she finally just gave up and squished a pillow in his face.

She was so in love with him. She is still hopelessly in love with him.

“Ah, now, look at you. Crying again,” the Doctor says. He gently turns her face toward him and wipes at her tears with his thumbs, making shushing sounds at her.

He is really, incredibly bad at this, Rose thinks, and hiccups laughter through her tears.

“Tell me about you, Rose Tyler,” he says, trying to calm her through distraction. She knows what he’s about. “Do you have kids? Kids are nice, aren’t they? I love kids. They’re so… sticky and honest. Or maybe a pet? A dog or a cat? A goldfish?”

Rose chooses to ignore the fact that he has just put her potential children on the same level with dogs, cats and goldfish and shakes her head. She sits back and takes a shaky breath to keep herself from crying some more. There will always be time for more tears when he’s gone and she’s sure that she will shed them. She knows she will, it isn’t the kind of thing that just leaves.

“No dogs or cats or goldfish,” Rose says, not addressing his question about children at all. They had tried for a while, but it just never worked out. That’s not the kind of thing she talks about with anyone, though, not even the Doctor. Maybe one day, but she just can‘t right now. “Once you’ve had your life threatened by cat and fish aliens, it just sort of… takes the fun out of it. I never have met a dog-faced alien, but they probably exist, too. I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“They do,” the Doctor says. “I see your point.”

She can’t stand television anymore, either. Once you’ve been eaten by one…

“I was so mad at you,” Rose says abruptly. “For such a long time. Because you _left_ me. You didn’t have to leave me and you left me.”

“Rose--”

“No, it’s okay,” Rose says. “I know.”

He frowns thoughtfully at that, then sits back from her and looks out at the ocean. He wonders just how much she does know, and how much she _thinks_ she knows. “What do you know?”

She knows that he wasn’t really afraid to say he loved her. He didn’t keep it to himself because it wasn’t there, he kept it to himself because the other one, _her_ Doctor had to be the one to say it. She needed to hear them even if they didn’t need to be said to be understood and the Doctor wasn’t a stupid man, so he knew that. He knew that Rose would grow old at his side, if she didn’t die there first, and he would go on and on. She had to let him go so that he could give her that other man who needed her so badly and loved her just as much. Of all his other companions throughout time, some of whom had surely loved him, the Doctor had given that mortal duplicate of himself to Rose.

It had taken her a long time, stupid ape that she is, to understand what that meant.

“I know,” Rose says again. She takes his hand again and squeezes. “Thank you.”

The Doctor lightly squeezes her hand in return. “You’re welcome.”

“I just thought I’d have more time,” Rose says. “I thought if he grew old at the same time as me that he would grow old _with_ me.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” the Doctor says.

“Yeah,” Rose says. She’s quiet for a minute, then she says softly, “I’m not, though. Not for anything.”

~~*~~

The sun stays behind the clouds and somehow they manage silence for quite a bit longer than nine and a half minutes after that. It has something to do with having talked and a little to do with touching the elephant in the room even if they don’t quite dare fully acknowledge it. He doesn’t fidget so much now, though he still shifts more than is probably normal because he is unused to sitting still, but he will sit as still as he can beside Rose Tyler for as long as she needs him to.

Then he will leave her again when she is ready for him to go.

“I keep running it all through my head,” Rose says, suddenly breaking the silence. “Like everything, like our whole lives, are on a loop. Do you think it’ll ever stop?”

The Doctor thinks about it and he’s not sure, but he doubts it. Going on experience, he sincerely doubts it. “Do you want it to?”

“I’m not sure,” Rose says. “Ask me again later.”

“You could come with me,” the Doctor says. “If you want.”

“Oh, no. I can’t do that,” Rose says. She sounds regretful, but she also sounds very sure. “I’m not the same and you’re definitely not the same. I’m older now, you said that yourself.”

“You’re not old. _I_ am old. You’re just…”

“Different,” Rose says. “I’m different and I know what it feels like to be left behind.”

“And I suppose you’ve got to think about your job,” the Doctor says.

“I suppose I do,” Rose says.

“And your rent.”

“Sure.”

“And the bills.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And what the rest of the family might think.”

“About what?” Rose says.

“You running off with another man,” the Doctor says.

“Oh. Well, I suppose so,” Rose says.

“Blimey, that sounds horrible,” the Doctor says.

“It’s not so bad. You get used to it,” Rose says. She gets to her feet with the urn of her dead husband’s ashes in her arms and starts toward the water. “There’s a girl up by the road. I think she’s waving for you.”

The Doctor twists around to look and sees Amy standing there, small but not so small that he can’t see her bright hair waving in the breeze off the water. She has both hands in the air and she’s waving them, trying to get his attention.

He lifts a hand and waves back as he gets up from the rocks where he has been sitting with Rose. “I met a man before I came here. Last Christmas, I think it was. _Some_ Christmas, anyway,” the Doctor says. “He asked me something.”

“Oh?” Rose says. She watches Amy while she waits for him to answer and smiles when she sees the young girl decide to just come down after him. Sometimes that really is the only way to go about it.

“If I had to choose one last day with you, which day would I choose?” the Doctor says.

Rose narrows her eyes on him warily. “What did you say?” she asks. “Did you say this one? It’s a funny day to choose if you did.”

“I didn’t say anything,” the Doctor says.

Rose relaxes slightly at that. “Good,” she says. Her eyes flick over his shoulder where the Doctor can hear the clatter of rocks and sand as Amy climbs down to where they are. She is smiling when she looks back at him. “Maybe you wouldn’t have chosen a _day_ anyway.”

“What?” he says.

“You’ll see me again,” Rose assures him.

“I might not look the same,” he warns her.

Rose nods and turns her back on him, walking again toward the water. “I know. You almost never do,” she calls back.

“ _What_?” he calls after her. “What? Rose? Did you say--Hang on, Amy, I’m coming,” he mutters, waving her off before she can speak. “Rose!”

Rose doesn’t answer, but she laughs and the wind carries the sound of it back to him.

~~*~~

In an alternate universe, on a world where she was never born, on the shore of a bay where sometimes the wall of reality is thin enough to breach, Rose crouches by the water and lets the waves roll in and out around her, filling up the urn in her hands and carrying its contents out to sea. She can hear the TARDIS as it leaves over the sound of the lapping water and her heart races just a little faster, and in her mind she is free to run up the road after him and she is always just in time to catch him… or let him go.

 

  


**XXX**  



End file.
